stellar echo

Like most people I really like google news. In particular the ability to customize the news that is relevent to me. Effectively making a news portal of the news that you want to see. This is unless you do not want to see googles ‘Top Stories’. I dont. Infact I am sick of the crap that has been selected as googles ‘top stories’ for the day. You can not help but feel there is very much a political influence involved in what is regarding as the top stories for google news. I decided to email google about this.

Hello Google,

I have much admiration for the power and ease of use of google news and
have been using the application for some time.

I have a single major annoyance with the customization features offered
and that is the inability to remove the ‘Top Stories’ block under the my
news customization. Not only can i not hide the block, i seem to be unable
to even relegate the block to the bottom and unviewed area of the page.

I have faith that the google devs are not forcing users a mandatory
placement of top stories in the centre of the screen as this would be a
major annoyance for people like myself who are not interested in the
‘progress in iraq’, or ‘the looming terrorist nation of iran’, or ‘dick
cheeney shoots a man in the face’.

I am an australian and care little for news outside of my local region. I
would like to place the news stories relevent to me in the centre/top of
the my customized google news view and hide the ‘top stories’ block
completely.

Could i please be advised if this is possible, and if not why the
functionality has been overlooked.

Kind Regards
Galen Parker

Their response unsuprisingly was thus;

Hi Galen,

Thank you for your note. We don’t currently offer a way to remove or edit
the ‘Top Stories’ section, but we’ll keep your suggestion to offer this in
mind. User feedback is very important to us, and we hope you’ll visit
Google News in the coming months to see our additions and improvements.

Regards,
The Google Team

So there you have it. Users who are not interested in what google considers its ‘Top Stories’ (for whatever reasons) are forced through the inability to hide/move the block. I have stopped using google news for this fact. I have worked around the problem by making a customised google home page (Personalised Home) and linked the RSS feeds of the news sources relevent to me. Its a damn shame that this is the only way to avoid what appears really to be a political (propaganda?) restriction on google news.